The culpability of YEC for leading to a spiritual crisis is clear in many
cases I know about personally. I took this very message with me when I
spoke at a Bible church in New Jersey a few months ago. It probably shocked
some of the people in the audience, so I illustrated it with the example of
my friend Ron Numbers, the prominent historian from the University of
Wisconsin. His story is public knowledge, he has told it in the
introduction to his book, "The Creationists."

Ron was a Seventh-day Adventist in grad school (Berkeley). One day he
attended a lecture on the geology of the Yellowstone River gorge and became
convinced that evidence strongly supported the conclusion that a series of
fossil forests had taken at least 30K years to have formed. This, in his
own perspective, led him down the slippery slope to agnoisticism.

Ron is (obviously) a highly intelligent person and very well informed about
religion--he's a past president even of the American Society of Church
History. His personal hermeneutic simply could not be adjusted to accept an
old earth, which of course was anathema to his religious tradition.

I know many others like Ron, but I don't have the right to tell their
stories publicly. Ron already has.